‘Caught by the Tides’ Review: Jia Zhangke Sees Constant Flux

In “Caught by the Tides,” the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke tracks a woman, a couple and a country across two tumultuous, transformational decades. As emotionally effective as it is formally brilliant, it draws on a trove of material — both fiction and nonfiction — that Jia began shooting in 2001 while working on another movie. He continued to document a dizzyingly changing China, a heroic project that has finally resulted in “Caught by the Tides,” a tour de force that is at once an affecting portrait of a people in flux and a soulful, generous-hearted autobiographic testament from one of our greatest living filmmakers.

Jia has directed more than a dozen feature-length movies since his 1997 drama “Pickpocket,” about a low-level thief, but the impoverished state of foreign-language distribution in the United States means that his work tends to quickly slip in and out of art houses here before heading to living rooms. He’s a rock star on the international festival circuit, however, and a favorite of the Cannes Film Festival, where his movies regularly screen in competition. Jia won the best screenplay award at Cannes for his 2013 masterpiece “A Touch of Sin,” but he tends to be overlooked by juries because while his movies aren’t difficult, they don’t offer obvious pleasures. They’re thoughtful, and they need to be watched thoughtfully in turn.

That’s true of “Caught by the Tides,” which follows a character who’s been featured in some of Jia’s earlier features, Qiaoqiao — Zhao Tao, Jia’s wife and longtime star — a willowy stunner with sharply planed cheekbones and a steady, penetrating gaze. That gaze is especially crucial here because while Zhao’s star charisma immediately commands your attention, her character never says a word. Instead, Qiaoqiao texts and she watches, observing the world and the people in it with eyes that, at times, flash with amusement and anger. When she’s with lover, Bin (Li Zhubin), her eyes also pool with tears that he doesn’t deserve.

Zhao is a sensitive, subtly expressive screen performer who can convey a world of feeling with a single look. Even so, a heroine who can speak but doesn’t could have been risky for Jia because her silence could drain the character of complexity and, importantly, a sense of female agency. Here, though, everything that needs to be said is said both in bits of conversation that fill in the elliptical story and in the many documentary passages, which makes her a stand-in for Jia. Bin, a small-time hood more interested in money than in Qiaoqiao, does speak, yet his words are invariably less eloquent than her (and Jia’s) quiet.

The story, such as it is, opens in the northern city of Datong and emerges gradually without the usual filmmaking preamble and prompts. If Jia has ever read a screenwriting manual, he probably immediately tossed it, laughing. His work fits more readily into art-cinema traditions than those of Hollywood, but is nevertheless insistently nonprogrammatic. “Caught by the Tides” takes place over some 20 years that, contrary to convention, aren’t shaped into neatly defined three (four or five) acts. Instead, time in the movie flows, just as in life. One minute, Qiaoqiao is young and has a bob and bangs; in the next she’s clearly older, and appears more inwardly directed, her now-long hair pulled back in a ponytail.

Qiao and Bin’s emotionally fraught romance winds throughout “Caught by the Tides,” but the movie’s heart and its obvious sympathies are more with her than with him. About a half-hour into the movie, she appears one night watching a joyful, raucous crowd flooding the street. It’s 2001, and China has just been named as the host of the 2008 summer Olympics. (“China won!”) The country is on the move, and Qiaoqiao soon will be too. Shortly thereafter, Bin splits to pursue a business venture elsewhere, and she follows. She’ll keep on following him for the remainder of the movie amid national milestones, more crowds, dramatic turns, many songs and a multitude of young and old, unlined and weathered faces.